Climate Science

Climate Science essentially provides the necessary information and platform from which to develop various mitigation and adaptation responses. ACDI affiliated centres and researchers are running climate models and collecting climate data, which provide an increasingly clearer picture of what the future climate may look like. The climate models are also being downscaled to be relevant and usable on a regional and even local scale. This growing database of climate science is ensuring that projections of the future climate are accessible to a large number of users. Whilst there will always be a certain degree of uncertainty, effective climate science can be used to make informed decisions as we move into and plan for an uncertain future.

With the concentration of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere now exceeding the symbolic mark of 400 parts per million, this presentation will detail what we understand of the response of the natural carbon reservoirs – the ocean and the terrestrial biosphere – to changes in atmospheric CO2. The natural reservoirs absorb more than half of the CO2 emitted to the atmosphere each year on average. Process understanding is now sufficient to account for most of the observed mean, trend and interannual variability of the CO2 sinks. However there is a large gap in our understanding of how the sinks respond to sub-decadal climate variability.